50 Saturday January 1 2022 | the times
Business
5
Galen Weston with his wife, Hilary; below, Doreen Lofthouse of Fisherman’s Friend and Sir Clive Sinclair in his famous C5The corporate universe has lost an
array of its brightest stars this year,
from colourful entrepreneurs and
stalwarts of City boardrooms to a
reclusive press magnate.
Galen Weston, the Anglo-Canadian
tycoon, turned an inheritance meas-
ured in the millions of pounds into a
fortune worth several billion and built
a retail empire that spanned Selfridges,
Primark, Ovaltine and Twinings Tea.
The son of Garfield Weston, who in-
troduced sliced white bread to Britain,
he attended more than a dozen schools
in Canada, England, South Africa and
the United States before cutting his
retail teeth in the Republic of Ireland.
He set up a self-service grocery shop
before taking over Todd Burns, a bank-
rupt department store that was re-
named Penneys and became the seed of
the wildly successful Primark chain. Yet
he is perhaps best remembered for his
audacious bid for Selfridges in 2003,
which valued the famous London
department store at £598 million.
He guarded his privacy closely,
particularly after a kidnap attempt by
the Provisional IRA in August 1983 at
Roundwood Park, his 17th-century
castle south of Dublin. Irish police, who
had received a tip-off, were lying in wait
and exchanged fire with seven masked
gunmen, five of whom were captured.
Weston retired in 2016 as chairman
of George Weston Limited and was
succeeded by his son. He died in April at
the age of 80 after a long illness.
Sir Clive Sinclair was 81 when he
died after a long illness in September.
One of Britain’s best-known inventors,
he created the world’s first pocket
calculator and kick-started the home
computing revolution by producing the
first PC to retail at less than £100.
Yet these triumphs were undercut by
the commercial failure of the Sinclair
C5. A cross between a bicycle and a car,
the electric three-wheeler was ridi-
culed as “the poor man’s Robin Reliant”.
Sinclair once predicted that annual
sales would rapidly reach 100,000, but
he sold only a few thousand in total and
incurred losses of about £7 million.
“Clearly, I should have handled it
differently,” he recalled.
He was, nevertheless, an imaginative
entrepreneur who cleared a path for
many others to follow. Countless com-
puter programmers learnt their craft
on his Spectrum machines in the early
1980s, laying the foundation for
Britain’s vibrant video games industry.
Sir David Barclay was an enigmatic
and reclusive billionaire who, with his
identical twin brother Sir Frederick,
owned Telegraph Media Group, Very
Group, the online retailer, and until last
year the Ritz hotel.
The Barclays were self-made men
who left school at 14 and had no family
wealth to help them to achieve billion-
aire status. They received knighthoods
at a joint ceremony in 2000. Four years
later they sealed the £665 million take-
over of the Telegraph titles, thought to
be the most expensive in British news-
paper history and buying the fiercely
Eurosceptic twins power and influence.
The Barclay family was rocked by a
public feud last year after the sale of the
Ritz. Sir David’s three sons were
accused by Sir Frederick of bugging
conversations in the conservatory of
the hotel, where he liked to conduct
business meetings and smoke cigars. Sir
David died unexpectedly after a short
illness in January at the age of 86.
Sir Gerry Robinson also rose from
humble beginnings. The ninth of ten
children, he was born in a fishing village
in Co Donegal and emigrated to
England as a child.
The confrontational business leader
made his name at the Grand Metro-
politan drinks and hotels group. In 1991
he was brought in to rescue Granada,
the catering, leisure and media com-
pany. Robinson gained notoriety after
taking a knife to the bloated business.
In his first five years, the company’s
earnings quadrupled and its share price
trebled, giving him unqualified support
from investors.
Later he was appointed chairman of
Arts Council England. David Puttnam,
the Oscar-winning film producer, once
said of Robinson: “Gerry wouldn’t duck
when the shit hit the fan.” Robinson was72 when he died of undisclosed causes
in October.
Lord Wolfson of Sunningdale spent
the early part of his career working for
the family firm Great Universal Stores,
a mail order retailer that had turned
into a conglomerate. In the 1980s he
became one of Margaret Thatcher’s
advisers and was at her side after the
Brighton bombing.
In 1989 he joined Next as chairman.
With David Jones as chief executive,
Wolfson rescued the retailer from over-
ambitious expansion plans and re-
turned it to profit. Jones would later hail
Wolfson’s ability to “identify the core
problem and address it without being
distracted by trivia”. Born David Wolf-
son, his son Simon, now Lord Wolfson
of Aspley Guise, has been
chief executive of Next
since 2001. Wolfson Sr
stepped down
from GUS in 2000.
He died of compli-
cations from de-
mentia in March
at the age of 85.
Tony Thornton
helped to turn his
family’s confectionery
business into one of Britain’s
leading chocolate makers. He
joined the firm in his early twen-
ties and became its head of retail
and marketing. He standardised
shop window displays — an inno-vation at the time — and introduced
moving displays of big chocolate Santas.
When he became chairman in 1978,
he reconciled his relatives’ competing
interests by floating the company on
the stock market. He retired in 1984 at
the age of 55 and became a patron of the
arts. He was 91 when he died in January.
Doreen Lofthouse built Fisherman’s
Friend into a global brand from a single
pharmacy in Fleetwood, Lancashire.
She was born in the fishing town and
went to work in the local chemist’s store
after leaving school at 15. After marry-
ing the proprietor’s son, she saw that thethroat lozenges could capture a wider
market than the local fishermen who
bought them to keep warm as they
trawled the Atlantic.
In her battered MG, Lofthouse
visited pharmacies across Lancashire
to drum up sales of the lozenge. In the
early 1970s, she opened a factory in
Fleetwood and began exporting, first to
Norway, then worldwide. The family
never took outside investment and
their estimated £120 million fortune
has been put into local philanthropic
projects, including refurbishing Fleet-
wood’s promenade. Lofthouse died in
March at the age of 91.
John Barton, who died suddenly
aged 77 last month, was a diligent and
understated figure in the many board-
rooms where he served as chairman.
He was known for his decade-long stint
in the chair of Next and his spell in the
bumpier environment of easyJet.
Born in Lahore (now in Pakistan) in
1944, he grew up in Angus, Scotland,
and started his business career at
Hunting, the air services group. Barton
moved to Jardine Matheson, which
sent him to Hong Kong and the
Philippines before settling in London as
finance director and later chief execu-
tive of Jardine Insurance Brokers.
After the company’s merger with the
Lloyd Thompson Group in 1997, he
became chairman of Jardine Lloyd
Thompson. That led to a succession of
City chairmanships, including Welling-
ton Underwriting from 2001 to 2006
and Next from 2006 to 2017, plus
shorter periods at Cable & Wireless and
Catlin Group. In 2020 he joined Ted
Baker, the clothing retailer, to steer its
recovery after the “forced hugging”
regime of Ray Kelvin, the founder.
Barton was sceptical of the venera-
tion of “strategy” in the boardroom,
arguing that plans should evolve over
time through trial and error. Once
asked for the golden rule of running a
business, Barton said: “I have two: treat
people with respect; and don’t worry. If
something goes wrong, don’t agonise
over it. Just sort it out.”
Arne Sorenson was a colossus of the
hotel industry who engineered a $13 bil-
lion merger that transformed Marriott
International into the world’s largest
chain. He was born in Tokyo, grew up in
Minnesota and became a corporate
lawyer. After he helped Marriott to un-
tangle a complex legal case in the 1990s,
Bill Marriott, son of the hotel chain’s
founder, hired Sorenson as his head of
mergers and acquisitions. In 2012 he be-
came the company’s first chief execu-
tive from outside the founding family.
His crowning achievement came
in 2016 when he acquired Starwood
Hotels and Resorts. The deal trans-
formed Marriott into the largest
hotels group in the world by
number of rooms. Sorensen was
62 when he died of pancreatic
cancer in February.BEN A. PRUCHNIE/GETTY IMAGES/SELFRIDGES
Simon Duke
Farewell to giants of the business world
JD Sports restructures executive pay after shareholder anger
Further changes to executive pay
policy and continuing efforts to appoint
a new head of its remuneration
committee have been promised by
JD Sports.
The FTSE 100 sportswear retailer
said that there would be “additional
amendments” to its remuneration
structures to “further align executive
pay with the long-term interests of
shareholders” and that it had hired
three new independent non-executive
directors — Bert Hoyt, a former Nike
executive, Helen Ashton, a former
finance chief at Asos, and Mahbobeh
Sabetnia, who has worked at Amazon
and Mars.
The previous chairman of JD’s remu-
neration committee was ousted in July,
when 54.6 per cent of investors who
voted at the company’s annual share-
holder meeting were against the re-
election of Andrew Leslie, 74, who had
been on the board for 11 years and had
headed the committee since 2013.
The length of his tenure was at odds
with corporate governance best prac-
tice and both Glass Lewis and Institu-
tional Shareholder Services, the proxy
voting advisory groups, had recom-
mended that investors vote against him
because of his responsibilities oversee-ing an “inappropriate pay policy”. Kath
Smith, former vice-president of The
North Face in Europe, has been acting
as interim head since then, with thecompany saying that the board had not
yet made a permanent appointment.
JD Sports has grown from a single
store in Bury, Greater Manchester, in
1981 to an international sportswearretailer, owning chains including
Footpatrol and Mainline, as well as its
eponymous stores. Peter Cowgill, 68,
has headed the company and chaired
the board for the past 17 years.
Last year JD stepped up its succes-
sion efforts and said that it intended to
divide his executive roles by the next
annual general meeting in the summer.
Cowgill made £4.3 million in bonuses in
2020, £3 million of which related to
awards given before the pandemic,
taking his total pay to £5 million despite
cutting his pay by three quarters.
Advisory groups had criticised the
business for paying Cowgill a bonus in
the year it had received £61 millionfrom the furlough scheme and had ben-
efited from £38 million in business rates
relief, which Cowgill has refused to
hand back. The pay policy was still
approved by 80 per cent of investors.
JD Sports said it had been encour-
aged that this approval was higher than
the 67.48 per cent it had received in
2020 and added after discussions with
shareholders that it had received “very
positive feedback” about planned
changes to its remuneration policy, in-
cluding the addition of a share-based
long-term incentive plan. Cowgill is the
company’s 17th largest shareholder.
Shares in JD Sports closed margin-
ally down 0.3 per cent, or ½p, at 217¾p.Ashley Armstrong Retail Editor
£61m
Received from the furlough scheme
Source: Times research